who knew how long.
He found Dream enthralling.
He loved her.
She didn’t doubt that anymore.
But he was afraid of her, of that she had no doubt. Afraid of her and everything her inexplicable hold over him might mean.
Several hours later, when neither of them had any more energy for fucking or astral-tripping, Dream made the pronouncement she’d been avoiding.
“It has to be tonight.”
He sighed and didn’t say anything for a while. Then he said, “Think of what we could have here, Dream. A hundred more years, maybe more, of days like this. We don’t have to go to Paradise. We can create it right here.”
Dream slipped out of his embrace and sat up on the bed. “Are you already breaking the vow you made to me, Ed? I know you don’t know a lot about love, so I’ll give you a little lesson. This is what’s known as a violation of trust.”
He laid a hand on her back and she flinched away.
He sat up next to her, slipped an arm around her shoulders. “Tonight, then.”
She settled into his embrace. “It has to be this way”
He stroked her hair. “I know.”
But his voice sounded distant.
That distance bothered her, but she believed he would ultimately keep his word. This conviction was based on more than something as nebulous as trust. The knowledge had shape, substance, was something that newly awakening part of her could feel. She could almost hold the truth of his promise in her hands like an orange. Peel away that orange’s outer layer of skin, however, and what you had in your hands was a squishy mass of fear.
This fear was enormous.
It was the fear of death-and the possibility he might be wrong about what awaited them on the other side. Though he didn’t want to acknowledge it aloud, she knew the possibility existed.
This might break him.
But she didn’t believe it would.
King left the room around midafternoon to “meditate” in his study. Dream didn’t question his need to be alone for a while. He’d lived so long, was close to immortal, and now he was hours away from dying. He needed time to marshal his thoughts and strengthen his resolve. Also, he’d already told her how the deed must be done. The gods, his death spirits, had to be involved, and he would need to commune with them. And there would be certain preparations only he could tend to.
The ritual he described sounded beautiful and appropriate.
She looked forward to it.
But now that she’d been alone for a time, her thoughts finally turned back to Karen and Alicia. She hadn’t seen them all day. Nor had either of them come looking for her. She had to assume something horrendous had happened to them. The thought did much to disperse the lingering field of charged eroticism that hung over her like a haze. Shame, her old friend, came roiling back, taunting her with accusations she couldn’t deny. She’d known her friends were in danger, yet she’d been unable to tear herself away from the hottest fuck of her life to go help them.
How appalling.
How unforgivable.
Dream was a normal woman in at least one regard-she liked sex. A lot. And she reveled in it when it was good. But she’d never known what it was like to be truly drunk on lust. Until now. Because only intoxication, of the overwhelming, good-sense-obliterating, falling-down-in-the-gutter variety, could explain her debauched behavior. Acts of grand atonement were obviously in order. One such act, the removal of her worthless soul from this miserable coil, was in the works. But there was one other thing she could do right now-go looking for her friends.
The certainty that the gesture was too late coming didn’t sway her.
The attempt was morally mandatory.
She got off the bed, found the travel bag Ms. Wickman had brought in at some point, and unzipped it. She felt around for the Glock, panicked for a moment when it wasn’t where it should be-tucked beneath the jumble of bras and panties crammed to the right-and experienced an ensuing sense of relief when her hand closed around the pistol’s cold plastic grip. She extracted it, dropped the bag, and stood up to examine the alien contraption. She’d never used a gun in her life, but she was able to discern that this particular gun had more than one safety mechanism. She experimented a little and settled on leaving two off and one on. A full magazine of ten bullets was in place.
Fine.
She could figure out the fucker’s basic operation. But there were other variables, important ones, that were a mystery to her-like, could she control the gun if she had to fire it? She was worried the recoil might be more than she could handle.
She would just have to pray and hope for the best.
But she had other concerns, as well.
Like, would she have the nerve to use the gun if she had to, even in self-defense?
She didn’t know.
That, like everything else, she would find out when the time came.
She set the gun on the bed with the barrel pointed away from her, pulled on the clothes she’d worn the previous day, and retrieved the gun. She held it at her side, the barrel pointed at the floor, her nervous finger outside the trigger guard.
She took a deep breath and walked out of the room.
The hallway extended before her like an endless corridor of hell. The passage was dimly lit by glass-covered candles in wall sconces. Dozens of closed doors loomed like silent sentries to either side. Dream’s capacity to experience fear began to rejuvenate itself. Sure, she wanted to die, even planned on it, but that was meaningless in the face of something so unfathomable. She was sure the hallway hadn’t seemed quite so long the night before, but it was possible her perceptions weren’t to be trusted, she’d been so intent on King and her desire for him.
Bullshit, the voice of rationality told her.
You know what you remember. It’s like Karen said, you saw what you saw. You’re a chick with a lot of problems, but you’re not insane.
And you don’t fucking hallucinate.
The hallway was different. Longer. Darker. Had there been candles in sconces last night? Dream didn’t think so. She was sure there’d been electric lights. There’d been a lot of doors to a lot of rooms, but she didn’t think there’d been quite this many. Okay, so what? She was faced with an inversion of reality that only mirrored what she’d seen outside King’s bedroom. She accepted that the substance of the house was fluid, malleable, and she had to assume the changes occurred due to subtle fluctuations in King’s mind. Some he controlled, some maybe he didn’t, the supernatural equivalent of brain farts. A disturbing notion occurred to her-what would happen to you if you were in one of the rooms that disappeared when King’s mind hiccuped?
She shivered.
She stood still in the doorway of the bedroom a moment longer, willing herself to be calm, and reestablished her connection with that thing inside her, the awakening power center. The connection was instant, and it was like a slap in the face. She touched that mass of knowledge again, the tangible fact of King’s vow to her, and held it firmly for a moment before coming back to herself.
Thus steeled, she ventured into the hallway.
She tried the first door she came to, her free hand closing around the doorknob. But it was unyielding when she tried to turn it. The same was true of the next door. And the next. And the next. Door after door after door until she’d tried dozens of them, all with the same frustrating result. She was near the end of the hallway now, could see the landing around the corner that led to the spiral staircase.
